Catching up!

A lot has happened since my last post: a vacation in France, the start of a new school year for the kids and the first release of a new Groovy utility that I've been working on, MetaBuilder.

MetaBuilder offers a number of features that make creating and using new builders safer and easier. First and foremost, it lets you specify your builder using a simple build language with lots of functionality to validate and control how objects are built.

Here's a Groovy script example to give you the flavor of it:

import groovytools.builder.*

MetaBuilder mb = new MetaBuilder()

mb.define {
 customer {
   properties {
     name(req: true)
     age(check: 1..120)
     sex(check: ~/M|F/)
  }
 }
}

def aCustomer = mb.build {
 customer(name: 'J. Doe', age: 25, sex: 'M')
}

If you manage to mistype a property name or violate a check constraint, MetaBuilder will throw an exception.